Scram! (11 page)

During the journey south, the cockpits of these four aircraft had to be specially adapted by the squadron engineers so they could be flown with the night vision goggles. The dim red lighting that normally lit the Sea King's cockpit instruments at night-time would look like dazzling bright sunshine when viewed through the ultra-sensitive goggles. The other four Sea Kings from
Hermes
were spread between the roll-on, roll-off ferry MV
Elk
and the P&O cruise liner
Canberra
. The new arrival from Ascension replaced Mike Crabtree's two Wessex on HMS
Intrepid
, which then made their way to the fuel ship RFA
Tidepool
. Bill Pollock and Simon Thornewill swapped ships so that Pollock could take charge of the special forces night-flying programme from
Hermes
, and Thornewill, as squadron commanding officer, could liaise with the landing force commanders on
Fearless
.

Just two days after arriving at Ascension, the carrier group led by HMS
Hermes
departed south, leaving behind the amphibious group to continue cross-decking and preparing for the eventual landings. The amphibious ships and landing forces weren't to set off until the naval battle was won.

On board RFA
Resource
, news of the two Wessex crashes on South Georgia was beginning to filter through via the BBC World Service. ‘Fuck me,' said Jack Lomas. ‘Thank God Tiddles and his boys didn't get themselves killed. But two Wessex lost. What a start!'

The following day the atmosphere became decidedly sombre with news that one of the Sea Kings on
Hermes
had flown into the sea at dusk, killing Petty Officer
Aircrewman
Kevin ‘Ben' Casey, the first British fatality of war. As if it were needed after the fiasco on Fortuna, the tragic accident was an unpleasant reminder that conditions in the South Atlantic would pose every bit as much of a threat to aircrew as direct action by the Argentine enemy.

As the fleet sailed further south, they left behind the balmy tropical weather of Ascension and entered the wildly changing conditions of the South Atlantic. On some days the sea would be completely flat calm and the surface almost oily. On others, the wind would whip up heavy seas making conditions for take-off and landing terrible. Often visibility was appalling. Finding ships out in the fleet in such weather, and getting back safely, required skill, ingenuity, and a healthy dose of self-preservation.

Without radar to guide, Wessex 5 crews mostly relied on a method of navigation called ‘dead reckoning'. It didn't matter exactly where the aircraft was over the sea. What mattered was where the aircraft was in relation to each ship. Dead reckoning meant applying a mental combination of wind and ship direction. The big assumption of course was that the ship's heading didn't change. Hence there was always a need to add a large margin for error. All naval aircrew have experienced the unnerving situation of returning to where ‘mother' should be only to find a vast expanse of sea and no sign of a ship.

The only navigation aid for the Wessex crew was a direction-finding needle on the cockpit panel that swung left or right in response to a radio signal, should the ship be generous enough to use its radio. But with radio silence the norm in the fleet, relying on wits and caution was usually the best strategy for avoiding a cold swim. In especially poor visibility, pilots would deliberately offset the return journey in order to cross a mile or two behind
the
ship and find the wake. It was then a simple matter of flying up the wake and hoping you then arrived at the right ship.

Along the way, the floating bomb that was RFA
Resource
regularly transferred ammunition to other ships. Some of this was done by ‘replenishment at sea', an impressive manoeuvre whereby both ships would sail close alongside one another. Lines would be shot from one ship to the other, followed by heavier lines. Stores could then be hauled across by lines of sailors while the ship transferred fuel by hose suspended from a separate line. The two Wessex helicopters were used extensively to assist in the ammunition transfer by underslung load. However, the containers used to hold the 4.5-inch shells for ships' guns were in limited supply. Under threat of attack during action stations, some of these boxes were simply despatched off the back of the flight deck, making the shortage even worse.

On board
Hermes
, the 846 Squadron Sea King detachment now had seven sets of second- and third-generation night vision goggles. To work properly, the goggles needed a minimum level of light from the moon or stars, so they couldn't be used in the pitch-blackness of heavy cloud cover. In most weather conditions, the goggles enabled the pilots to fly their aircraft visually, almost as if it were daylight, albeit in monochromatic green. However, it wasn't quite as easy as flying in daylight. The image presented was two-dimensional, not allowing any perception of depth, and making distance and closing speeds very difficult to assess. Bill Pollock compared it to peering through a tube of bog roll underwater.

Using the night vision goggles and the Sea King's automatic height hold, linked to the radio altimeter, pilots could keep their aircraft just twenty feet above the land and fifty
feet
above the sea. The stop at Ascension had given 846 Squadron a chance to show off their new skills to some very interested observers from special forces. A night flight around the island followed by a landing in total darkness told them all they needed to know: flying at night and at extreme low level was the ideal way to get the troops in and out of the Falklands covertly.

Getting the troops to the right place was another matter. The Sea Kings were equipped with a Tactical Air Navigation System that could be aligned with the ship's own navigation system just before take-off. Without a satellite or beacon to provide constant updates, the system relied on what the instruments within the aircraft were telling it. Over time, tiny errors would creep in and the system would drift, becoming less and less accurate. But by cross-checking several aircraft systems against each other at periodic intervals of flight, it was hoped that the errors would average out. Flying in from the sea as a formation, the plan was to aim to hit land, offset to one side of a known point. That way they knew which direction to look for it, updating their systems as they coasted in. The formation would then split up and each Sea King would complete its individual mission. Concordia Rock was chosen as the known point, because of its distinctiveness and remoteness.

Pollock realised that he was going to have to work hard to keep his pilots and aircrew alive. The training on the way south had shown that crews could cope with long periods of flying at extremely low level over the sea using the night vision goggles. But the extra hour, and often much longer, of flying and navigating over the featureless terrain of the Falklands was going to increase the workload in the cockpit dramatically. Keeping crews rested and aircraft serviced meant his four night-flying Sea Kings would not be available
for
flying during the day. Dealing with the many frustrations this posed meant keeping good relations with Admiral Sandy Woodward's staff who were running the campaign, the captain's staff who were running the ship, and the aviation staff who were running aircraft operations.

Planning was also complicated, split between the 3 Brigade command on board
Fearless
, still parked off the coast of Ascension Island, and the planning team on board
Hermes
, some 4,000 miles south. Wardroom Two on
Hermes
was closed off for special forces planning. None of the aircrew or troops actually involved in the missions was allowed inside so as not to compromise other missions if they were captured and interrogated. But coordination was needed to make sure each individual mission was achievable and that aircraft wouldn't suddenly run into one another in the dark.

Somebody also needed to make sure the returning helicopters weren't going to get shot down by their own side. Low-flying aircraft unexpectedly approaching the fleet at night from the direction of the Falklands were likely to have a brief and unpleasant encounter with a Sea Harrier or a Sea Dart missile. The fleet needed to know when the Sea Kings were going out and when they were coming in. Somebody had to negotiate this complex chain of command and make sure everybody knew what they needed to know. Only Lieutenant Commander Bill Pollock knew all the details. It meant he wasn't going to get much flying done himself.

On the evening of Friday 30 April, the British carrier group entered the 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) now declared around the islands. Any non-British ship or aircraft entering this zone could expect to be fired upon without warning. The Falklands War kicked off for real
approaching
midnight as Lieutenant Nigel North's flight of three
junglie
Sea Kings lifted off from the deck of
Hermes
.

North had started his preparation four hours before launch time with a briefing of all the crews, followed by the individual brief for his particular mission. It was a pleasant night as he walked out across the flight deck of the carrier. The dark shapes of the three Sea Kings with their drooping blades awaited their occupants. As mission leader, his first job was to lead the formation of Sea Kings across the eighty miles of South Atlantic now separating
Hermes
from Concordia Rock.

As the crews prepared each of the Sea Kings for startup, heavily laden SAS and SBS troops boarded the aircraft with their huge bergens. With rotors turning and a final fix of their position from the ship, the formation lifted off and disappeared into the blackness. The Sea Kings flew low across the sea. Without goggles, the world outside was black and unmoving. With them, a green sea scrolled beneath the aircraft as the pilots headed towards a green horizon. After a couple of position checks from the other aircraft, North was satisfied that he was to coast in on track at the right place.

The sea transit in formation went well. Even so, North felt mighty relieved to hit landfall within a mile of Concordia Rock. The navigation system was working. The formation then split to go their separate ways and North now concentrated on his own individual mission. Apart from flights around Salisbury Plain and Ascension Island, this was the first time any of the crews had flown at low level over land at night. Throughout the journey south, all of the crews had spent hours poring over maps of the Falklands to try to memorise the main features and get a mental picture of what was to come. What North and his
co-pilot
Lieutenant Alan ‘Wiggy' Bennett had not expected was that the ground seemed to be covered in snow. Cursing the ‘met' man on
Hermes
for failing to forecast accurately, they continued on.

The drop-off point for the SAS team was just north-west of Estancia House, a collection of farm buildings some twelve miles from the capital Port Stanley. Depositing their troops on the ground with surprising ease, the crew were convinced the roar of the helicopter would be heard throughout the entire Falklands. But shielded from the capital by a line of hills, it was doubtful whether anyone would have heard them. After lifting off, aircrewman Colin Tattersall leant forward to say he had cut a piece of Falklands heather for the pilots to take back to the ship, but he had seen no sign of snow. It was just how the grassland looked through the goggles. The met man was reprieved.

Still feeling nervous about the noise they were making the pilots focused on getting back to the sea and relative safety as quickly as possible. In the back, Tattersall was pointing a radar-warning receiver in all directions. There were no emissions. The Argentines didn't even know they were there.

Having set off in formation, the three aircraft dropped their teams and returned to
Hermes
individually. Bob Horton and Paul Humphreys in one of the other Sea Kings had seen another aircraft, most likely Argentine, but evaded successfully. The first covert mission of the war had been a remarkable success.

Later on board
Hermes
, Bill Pollock went to debrief Captain Lyn Middleton, and presented him with some heather: ‘A piece of the Falkland Islands for you, sir.'

‘Bloody hell,' replied Middleton. ‘If we're going to take the Falklands bit by bit, it's going to take a long time.'

* * *

Just before dawn on 1 May, an RAF Vulcan bomber from Ascension Island, 4,000 miles to the north, conducted an extreme long-range bombing raid on Port Stanley airfield. This mission was the first of seven codenamed ‘Black Buck'. As an exercise in logistics it was genuinely impressive and remarkable. Eleven Victor tankers and two Vulcans took off from Wideawake airfield at midnight in order that one Vulcan could drop its load of twenty-one 1,000-pound bombs diagonally across the runway.

The effectiveness of the mission itself was rather more questionable. Only one of the bombs hit the runway, with negligible effect on Argentine operations. Subsequent bombing missions missed the runway altogether. Even if they had hit, the crew forgot to arm the bombs on their second mission, according to the commanding officer of 801 Sea Harrier squadron. It was an unbelievable error after all the effort to get them there. Later missions launched Shrike missile strikes against radar installations. For this, the radars had to be switched on in order to allow the missile to home in. Realising the threat, the Argentine operators simply switched their radars off. The missions achieved little.

The RAF publicity machine subsequently tried to talk up how the Black Buck raids demonstrated their ability to bomb the Argentine mainland. However, a single unescorted Vulcan bomber would have been easy meat for an Argentine Mirage fighter. It was an empty threat. The credit claimed for the Vulcan raids demeaned the actual RAF contribution of pilots, engineers and aircraft, which, even if relatively small, was both important and significant. This was neither. The entire Black Buck mission turned out to be an expensive and ineffective exercise in inter-service politics.